Rotating Tower Platform Game

Last month I started a prototype for a platform game that took
place on a rotating tower. Then life happened and I got busy and it was
stuck on the back burner.

But it was in a good enough state to publish the source
and let you play now:

left/right keys to walk

up/down to climb

space to jump.

collect coins

avoid monsters

reach the top of the tower

Nebulus (a.k.a Tower Toppler)

If you’ve been around long enough you might have played
Nebulus
on the c64 (I think it was called ‘Tower Toppler’ on other
platforms). It pushed the limits of what the c64 could do
graphically, but it was also a great game to play with
challenging level design.

This demo isn’t intended to be a clone of Nebulus, merely ‘inspired by’, and
obviously has a lot of differences, many of which are simply because I won’t have
the time to finish this prototype.

ladders instead of elevators (easier to program)

ground instead of water (no need to animate)

no dissolving platforms

no shortcut doors

no exit at top of tower

no real way to die

no score

no timer

no level design

coins to collect (I like collecting stuff)

Limitations

Here are a couple more caveats to admit:

Modern browsers only - Chrome, Firefox, IE9/10

NO mobile support - If I wanted to build mobile I would go 100% native.

NO touch support - no mobile, no touch

NO endgame - it’s just a prototype, only 1 demo level, there is no endgame

NO menu - it’s just a prototype, there is no menu, high scores, credits, etc

How-it-works

At its heart, its really just a slightly more complex version of my
earlier tiny platformer, with some changes:

The 2D map is rendered as a (simulated) 3D tower

The 2D map must wrap horizontally

Entities are bigger than a single cell…

… making the collision detection more complex

Real animated sprites instead of plain rectangles

The biggest changes are in the renderer and the collision detection.

I hope to get some time later this week to write up some in-depth articles about those topics: